Meeting Room Booking with Conflict Guard

The problem this kills

It's 9:55, the quarterly review starts in five minutes, and someone has booked the boardroom for a one-on-one. Or two people both "reserved" the same room in two different spreadsheets and now they're standing in the doorway glaring at each other. Or the big training room - the one with the projector and seats for twenty - keeps getting grabbed for two-person calls while the actual workshop has nowhere to go.

In most offices, room booking is a shared calendar nobody trusts, a sign-up sheet on a door, or a "just ask reception" system that lives in one person's head. There's nothing stopping two bookings from overlapping. There's no way to protect the premium rooms. And when the boardroom gets double-booked in front of a client, it's the office manager who wears it.

This tool replaces the free-for-all with a real reservation system: live availability, a hard rule against overlapping bookings, and an approval gate on the rooms that matter - so the right room goes to the right meeting, every time.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Imports your rooms list from a CSV or sheet (name, capacity, location, equipment, and which rooms need approval).
• Imports your staff list so only your people can book.
• Shows real-time availability - pick a room and a time and instantly see whether it's free.
• Hard-blocks double-bookings - two reservations can never overlap on the same room, enforced in the database, not just the screen.
• Auto-confirms instant rooms and routes premium/large rooms to an office manager for approval before they're held.
• Warns when the attendee count exceeds the room's capacity so the 30-person all-hands doesn't land in a 6-seat huddle room.
• Sends a confirmation email plus a calendar hold (a standard .ics file your calendar understands).
• Has a cancellation flow that frees the slot immediately so someone else can grab it.
• Shows a daily room schedule view - every room, every booking, at a glance.
• Exports bookings as CSV (and calendar holds as .ics) so it works even with no calendar integration.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how people book rooms today, the exact list of rooms with their capacities and equipment, which rooms are "premium" and who approves them, your busiest booking times, your rules about how far ahead people can book, and your messiest edge cases (recurring meetings, all-day holds, buffer time between bookings, the VIP who can grab any room). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to your office, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model.
• The full build: database, login, rooms and staff import, the live availability + conflict engine, the booking screen, the approval gate, emails and calendar holds, the daily schedule, and the cancellation flow.
• The hard conflict guard and the human approval gate for premium rooms.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV/ICS export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to your company calendar.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a facilities team actually needs:

• Login so only your staff can see or book anything.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own rooms and bookings.
• A complete audit trail - every booking, approval, rejection, and cancellation is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - for approval-required rooms, an office manager reviews and approves before the booking is confirmed and the hold is sent; the AI never auto-confirms a premium room.
• A hard conflict guard - overlapping bookings on the same room are physically prevented, so double-bookings simply can't happen.
• Duplicate guards so the same request can't be booked twice on the same room and overlapping time.

Who it's for

Office managers, facilities coordinators, executive assistants, and reception teams who are tired of refereeing room fights and protecting the boardroom by hand - and who want a real, auditable booking tool without buying a heavyweight workplace platform. You don't need to write code. You need your rooms list, your staff list, and a weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.